Torey Hayden - Silent Boy - He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence

I didn’t want this case. As it was, I already had too many children to become involved with one who would obviously be a black hole-a maw to dump time and energy and effort into with no return. And as I sat and listened and drew geometric designs on the blotter, I had an even more shameful thought. This was a private clinic; we usually didn’t get the welfare kids. All I had to do to get rid of this case was mention money in a very serious way. While Garson Gayer would obviously foot the bill for my initial work with Kevin Richter, if I didn’t want the case, well, that would be the easiest way.…

It was tempting. It was a good deal more tempting to refuse this case than I was ready to admit. Yet I couldn’t. I could think such thoughts but I couldn’t make myself act on them. It would have been so different in the schoolroom. Ed or Birk or Lew simply would have rung me from the Special Ed Office and told me, ‘I’ve got a new kid for you.’ And I would have groused because I always groused, and they wouldn’t have noticed because they never did. Then he’d be mine, that loser, that kid with no hope, who couldn’t make it anywhere else, and we’d try there in my room, amidst the battered books and the rummage-sale toys and noisy finches and the stink of unchanged pants, to build another chance. We didn’t succeed very often. Our triumphs, when they did come, were few and small. Sometimes no one else even noticed them. But it didn’t matter. I never thought of not trying, only because I never had the godly privilege of judging if I should. Or if I could. Or if I would. So, while not wanting this case, I took it and agreed to come. Given the option and seeing the odds, I sure wasn’t keen about it. But I did not think that should be my decision.

Because of my classroom experience and my research, I had evolved therapeutic techniques which varied a little from those of my colleagues at the clinic. I preferred to see the more seriously disturbed children daily over a shorter period of time, rather than once a week over many months or years. Also I often went to the child instead of having him come to the clinic, so that we could work in the troubled environment. In the initial sessions, I was very definite about setting up expectations for the child. From the beginning we both knew why I was there and what things we needed to accomplish together. On the other hand, the sessions themselves tended to be casual, unstructured affairs. This approach worked well for me and I was comfortable with it.

My research had yielded a reliable method for treating elective mutes. I set up the expectation that the child would speak, gave him the opportunity to do so and assumed he would. However, I was not sure what I could do for Kevin-under-the-table. While the technique had always worked before, I was concerned about its applicability to him. The most critical question, I thought, as I hung up from talking with the social worker, was whether or not Kevin was an elective mute. Had he ever really talked? To a worried or wishful parent, so many noises could sound like words. By my calculations, he would have been a very young child when anyone last actually heard him speak, and then it had only been his immediate family. Could a five-year-old sister be a trusted judge of speech? Could a mother assess the quality of her preschool son’s words, if she only occasionally heard him talk at home? And there was no evidence at all that anyone who might be considered a reliable judge of normal speech had ever heard him. Kevin wasn’t deaf; that had been checked repeatedly by the various institutions he had been in. He could gesture his basic needs but he did not know true sign language. Someone had tried to teach him at Garson Gayer, but a suspected very low IQ was cited when he didn’t learn. For all intents and purposes, Kevin was noncommunicative. Whether his silence was the result of choice or of circumstances or of disturbance or of some organic occurrence in the brain, no one knew.

So what could I do with him? How could I find out?

That first day in the therapy room had been vaguely reassuring to me. Despite his bizarre behaviors, he was aware enough of his environment to do something as canny as count the people leaving the room behind the mirror. That wasn’t a stupid boy’s actions, whatever his reported IQ. And yet he had let me in on the secret. When the others had left, he stopped rocking and responded to me.

Another thing I knew he could do was read. In fact, according to Kevin’s written schoolwork, he read startlingly well for a boy educated in institutions as if mentally retarded. He could comprehend a written text at a seventh-grade level.

Armed with these scanty bits of information, I decided to plow my way right in, assume he could talk and try to get him to. I settled on a tactic that had worked with other elective mutes: I’d have him read aloud to me from the book we’d started in the mirrored therapy room.

The next morning I returned to Garson Gayer. Gratefully, I accepted an alternative room down near the ward rather than go back to the room with the one-way mirror. The other therapists needed that room, Miss Wendolowski said, and I was quite glad not to have it. Kevin and I did not need the worry of ghosts along with everything else.

The room we got was a bare little affair. It was small. I could pace it in four steps either direction. The only furniture consisted of a table, two chairs and a bookcase with no books in it. There was a vomit-green carpet, the kind that wears like Astroturf. One wall was half windows, a nice feature. A broad radiator ran along the length below the windows and uttered a small reptilian sound. All other walls were bare and painted white, a not-quite-white white, gloss two-thirds of the way up for washability and the rest flat paint. That was an institutional painting habit and I hated it. I always felt as if I were in a discreet cage and, when a teacher, I’d felt obliged to hang the kids’ work up there on the flat part and get it mucky, just for the freedom of it. Here there were no pictures on the walls at all, no posters, nothing, save a black-and-white clock that audibly breathed the minutes. And the pale golden September sunshine.

I arrived before Kevin that morning. An aide escorted me down and then left to fetch him. I stood alone in the small room and waited. Beyond the windows I could see a little girl outside in the courtyard. She looked to be about eight or nine and was confined to a wheelchair. Her movements were spastic and her head lolled to one side. I could hear her crying for someone named Winnie. Over and over again she wailed, her voice high-pitched and keening. It was a lonely sound that made my skin crawl.

The door opened and the aide pushed Kevin in. Then, without entering himself, the aide asked me when we’d be through. Thirty minutes, I replied. He nodded, jangled his keys a moment and seemed ready to say something else. But he didn’t. Instead he closed the door and I heard the key turn in the lock. That startled me. I had no key of my own to let us out and I hadn’t expected to be locked in. A small twinge of panic pinched my stomach and I had to take a deep breath before I could accept the fact and turn to face Kevin.

He stood paralyzed with fear. His eyes darted frantically around the room. I was between him and the table and I could see him weighing the danger of passing me to get to safety.

He was a tall youth. It was the first time I’d had a real look at him, and he was a big boy, nearly a man, although an aura of youngness clung to him. He was at least as tall as I was, but thin and frail looking, like a winter cornstalk. Brown hair fell lank over his forehead. Adolescence had ravaged his skin, leaving him with lumpy features and cheeks smothered in acne. Thick-lensed glasses slid down his nose, in spite of a black elastic strap to keep them in place. His eyes were gray and lifeless as a city puddle. He wore church-box clothes, a hopelessly too-small red-checked flannel shirt and gabardine trousers that barely covered the tops of his socks. He looked more like a cartoonist’s caricature of a boy than a real person.